Leadership

You don’t have three months. At least, not in the way you think you do. A client of mine came in with a familiar plan for the fourth quarter. Hit her year-end goals, build next year’s plan and budget, finish performance evaluations for her team. She thought she had three months. We counted.

A woman I worked with made chief operating officer after nine years of aiming at it. She had the announcement, the flowers on her desk, the messages from people she had not heard from in years. On her first Monday in the new office, she sat down, looked at her calendar, and felt nothing. Then she felt something.

The suitcase is still in the hallway. You have walked past it four times today. You will move it tonight, or tomorrow, or Thursday. It is not really about the suitcase. You went away. You slept. You read something that was not a deck or a board packet. You came back and by Wednesday morning the same weight was sitting on your chest that was sitting there in July. Same inbox. Same knot. Same quiet question you have not said out loud to anyone.

Most high-achieving women don’t feel stuck in an obvious way. They’re still performing. Still delivering. Still the one people rely on. But underneath that external momentum there’s often a quieter experience: a sense of friction that doesn’t fully go away. Not burnout in the dramatic sense. More like misalignment that sleep, vacations, or even achievement no longer seem to fix.
You can point to your accomplishments. You’ve built something meaningful. You have goals, direction, and capability. From the outside, there’s no obvious reason for anything to feel off.